Quarter of a Million Without Drinking Water In French Floods

Dec. 4, 2003

MARSEILLE, France (AFP) - A quarter of a million people were without drinking water in the south of France as flooding threatened to contaminate tap water and disrupted and road and rail transport.

A 37-year-old father of two drowned in his garage in the town of Bellegarde after suffering an asthmatic seizure.

Things eased up Thursday, but schools stayed closed in the Gard and Herault areas, where heavy rainfall on high ground led to flash-flooding down tributaries of the rivers Rhone and Herault.

Further west 2,000 people were evacuated as a precautionary measure from their homes in Montauban, on the river Tarn.

Crowds queued in the Roman amphitheater in the Nimes for hand-outs of bottled water after authorities warned the 250,000-strong population of the area that flooding may have contaminated tap water.

Meanwhile some 400 German civil protection experts were expected in Arles Friday to back up French emergency services, after Germany made a special offer of assistance.

Flooding got worse near Arles Thursday.

The victim who died Thursday had gone to his garage to try to rescue various objects.

Police said he had had an asthma attack, fell into the water, and drowned.

Since Monday downpours and high winds have killed six people, forced the evacuation of tens of thousands, and shut down two nuclear power stations.

France's second city, Marseille, was declared a disaster zone Wednesday as a result of torrential rain and winds of up to 150 kilometres (90 miles) per hour.

Rivers remained at dangerously high levels, but the state meteorological office downgraded a state of alert in eight administrative departments stretching between the Spanish and Italian borders, after the severe weather eased overnight.

"We are getting out of the crisis, but we're not through yet ... the situation is still worrying," said Christian Fremont, chief local government officer of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur region.

Officials said the Rhone river reached levels overnight not seen since the 19th century, with a flow measured at 13,000 cubic metres per second. However they said with a few exceptions dykes had held firm, and river levels across the region were beginning to fall.

Stung by criticism that it failed to react quickly enough to a deadly heatwave last summer, the government responded promptly to the state of emergency in the south, with President Jacques Chirac flying to the region Wednesday and promising 12 million euros (14 million dollars) in disaster relief.

But tough questions were being asked over whether urban planning policies had aggravated the effects of flash-flooding, and whether more should be done to slow down climate change -- blamed by many for the apparently increasing rate of meteorological crises in France.

"We can easily see that climate phenomena that used to be thought of as exceptional are now happening practically every year or at least at regular intervals. It obliges us to develop new and tougher policies," said Ecology Minister Roselyne Bachelot.

Meanwhile France's neighbour and close EU partner Germany Thursday offered it assistance in fighting the current calamity.

Interior Minister Otto Schily said in Berlin his French opposite number Nicolas Sarkozy had accepted an offer of assistance.

Schily said he had offered the aid of emergency services experts with Germany's Technisches Hilfswerk (THW), which specializes in dealing with natural disasters and played a major role in coping with flooding on the German rivers Elbe and Danube in August 2002.

Some 400 German specialists were expected Friday in Arles near where floods worsened Thursday.

Up to 500 people had to be evacuated at Trebon, north of Arles.

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